Doom with MIDI sound effects

fraggle said:

khokh2001 found this:

http://unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/source/dmx/

It appears to be the DMX source code.

And http://unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/source/dmx.zip appears to be a convenient zip archive of all the content from this directory.

OPL makes much more sense to me for this since they... well, can actually build noises instead of musical instruments sounds. haha

joe-ilya said:

But why?

Because it's freakin coooooool! 8D
Besides, at that time it was the only option available when people don't had soundblaster cards (with digitalized sound support). I believe this was the purpose.

Note that this was specifically for Roland GS-compatible systems, which have the ability to have several instrument banks. Typically, bank 0 would be for General MIDI, but the 65535 other instrument banks allowed by the standard could be used for anything else, including sound effects.

I also remember playing games using MIDI sound effects when Adlib wasn't available, for example Dune II in MT-32 mode.

Am I the only one who is glad that these sound effects weren't in the game by default?

I've thrown up a mirror of those apparent source files just in case http://www.doomworld.com/linguica/dmx_source/dmx.zip

Gez said:

Note that this was specifically for Roland GS-compatible systems, which have the ability to have several instrument banks. Typically, bank 0 would be for General MIDI, but the 65535 other instrument banks allowed by the standard could be used for anything else, including sound effects.

I also remember playing games using MIDI sound effects when Adlib wasn't available, for example Dune II in MT-32 mode.

Interesting. But even using defined instruments, OPL can be anything, or I'm wrong? I mean, they can actually build noises as sound effects or the presets would clash with what is used for music?

OPL is more limited and it's always going to sound like OPL. You can't make arbitrary sound waves with OPL, since you're limited to combinations of a few basic waveforms. There's also a limited number of channels, so taking one for sound effects means having one less for music.

http://doomwiki.org/wiki/OPL_emulation

Yes, that's what I mean. But when I say that OPL can be anything i'm talking about the waveform manipulation, different of that general midi instrument thing (I don't know how to call it specifically) that apparently only uses the same instrument-sounds all the time.

In terms of synth setup that don't try to imitate real instruments, there almost infinite possibilities when you can modulate waves into his core. But yeah, they always will have those FM characteristics too.

Gez said:

You can't make arbitrary sound waves with OPL, since you're limited to combinations of a few basic waveforms.

The same thing was thought about SID. And then, someone came up with a way to play 8 bit samples on individual channels, with filters available.
Who knows, someone might surprise us someday. Playing MIDI sound effects in vanilla Doom was quite a surprise too. I would never have thought about that possibility.

jmickle66666666 said:

Hm, that's strange. The OPL won't work unless you rename the sounds DAxxx (I don't have a wad on hand currently for you to test with, at work currently), but 6 should work with the one provided. Is the midi soundtrack playing correctly?

Yes, the music is playing fine. No idea what's going on, maybe Windows XP is just too old.

Did anyone else actually try loading these wads?

Its like doom from the era of silent movies, with pianist accompaniment.

What this really needs now is a sepia tint, feathered vignette and flickering dust/scratches

LogicDeLuxe said:

The same thing was thought about SID. And then, someone came up with a way to play 8 bit samples on individual channels, with filters available.
Who knows, someone might surprise us someday. Playing MIDI sound effects in vanilla Doom was quite a surprise too. I would never have thought about that possibility.

Sure, you could perform some advanced sound analysis on PCM samples to determine how to approximate them with combinations of the OPL waveforms, and then run the result of this analysis to an OPL chip (or emulator). That would be a lot of work for something that'd be useful only on pure Adlib cards (not SoundBlaster cards, which had their famous "DSP" for playing back PCM samples).

Point is, just because something is possible doesn't mean it's feasible. :p

mouldy said:

Its like doom from the era of silent movies, with pianist accompaniment.

What this really needs now is a sepia tint, feathered vignette and flickering dust/scratches

And the soundtrack has to be piano only as well.

If it were a theater which could afford an orchestra, it certainly had more to offer for sound effects as well.

And luckily, Doom had no speech. The game would have been interrupted for a full screen text card every time someone says something, if it were for the silent movie era feel.

LOL essel

And here's the the perfect music to go with it.

I wonder what it would take to get DMX GPL'd. It'd be neat to compile Chocolate Doom for DOS with this DMX source.

Eris Falling said:

LOL essel

And here's the the perfect music to go with it.

cough https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/music/ragtime2

Sodaholic said:

I wonder what it would take to get DMX GPL'd. It'd be neat to compile Chocolate Doom for DOS with this DMX source.

I'm looking into this.

Gez said:

Note that this was specifically for Roland GS-compatible systems, which have the ability to have several instrument banks. Typically, bank 0 would be for General MIDI, but the 65535 other instrument banks allowed by the standard could be used for anything else, including sound effects.

I also remember playing games using MIDI sound effects when Adlib wasn't available, for example Dune II in MT-32 mode.

Noiser said:

Interesting. But even using defined instruments, OPL can be anything, or I'm wrong? I mean, they can actually build noises as sound effects or the presets would clash with what is used for music?

You may have heard of the extra sound banks, for example Yamaha has XG and XG-Lite. Some keyboards (such as mine) when given an instrument in a sound bank it does not have a sound for will end up just playing some other instrument with the same number in a different bank. So say if a MIDI uses instrument 0 in bank 21312 and my keyboard lacks it, it will just use the generic MIDI acoustic grand piano (instrument 0 in bank 0).

Gez said:

Note that this was specifically for Roland GS-compatible systems, which have the ability to have several instrument banks. Typically, bank 0 would be for General MIDI, but the 65535 other instrument banks allowed by the standard could be used for anything else, including sound effects.

So you could presumably create a secondary sound bank containing all of Doom's sound effects, a WAD containing matching GSS sound lumps, and play the entire game as normal, all through your Roland. Would be pointless, but a cute hack nonetheless :)

I already posted this video in the other thread - people commented that the pistol sound effect sounds pretty good. Presumably that's because it's using the General MIDI "gunshot" instrument and if you have a MIDI bank with decent samples, you're using an actual gunshot sound:

Also seems the gunshot is like, the one sound they actually replaced.

To me that pistol sounds like a carpenter at work. Not that great. :)

What a fucking cacophony!

I like it.

Now all we need is each song from the game in PC speaker format.

fraggle said:

Indeed with OPL it doesn't sound so good.

I think it could be better (like the Bio-Menace gunshot), but I liked!

A long time ago I created some OPL sounds for Doom (they are more arcade-like) using the Adlib Tracker II and them recording as wav files. When I have time I could post them to whom may interest.

Noiser said:

A long time ago I created some OPL sounds for Doom (they are more arcade-like) using the Adlib Tracker II and them recording as wav files. When I have time I could post them to whom may interest.

I'm certainly interested.

I started making my own MIDI sound effects WAD. Download the latest version here. If you're interested in contributing feel free to check out the source code and send pull requests.

fraggle said:

I started making my own MIDI sound effects WAD. Download the latest version here. If you're interested in contributing feel free to check out the source code and send pull requests.

So are you making up your own sound effects in this? They're not, like, converted from anything, right?

They're constructed by hand. If you check out the GitHub repository you can see the source code.

You can achieve quite a lot just using some simple pitch ramps and a lot of experimentation. I made use of the reload hack to reduce the turnaround time.

fraggle said:

So you could presumably create a secondary sound bank containing all of Doom's sound effects

GS standard has no sample upload abilities. There is a wavetable ROM and the GS engine makes extensive use of applying effects on those waves. With SysEx, you could play a lot with the effect settings, but that's about it.
It works similar to MT-32, but unfortunately completely incompatible.

On the other hand, there is no reason to limit the MIDI capabilities to GS devices. You could use soundfonts on MIDI devices supporting it, I suppose.

Or MIDI devices with sample upload capabilities. Does Doom support SysEx when playing regular MIDI files?